This past Thursday night, Daily Wire writer Michael Knowles came to speak at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC). A mob of thirty or so students and hangers-on heckled him, and one sprayed him with what proved to be a nontoxic substance. While the campus police wrestled the student to the ground, his or her or “hir” colleagues chanted the lethal and long since discredited mantra, “Hands up, don’t shoot.”

For conservative speakers on college campuses, the disruption was business more or less as usual. What was not usual, at least not in this part of the world, was the “official” response. As quickly became clear, there are no “liberals” any more. Their young have cowed them here and elsewhere into a cringing, uncritical embrace of the progressive menu du jour.

The missive UMKC chancellor Mauli Agrawal sent to the “campus community” after the event reads like a hostage letter. To describe Knowles’s views, Agrawal used the words “controversial,” “unpopular,” and “extreme.” Agrawal concluded his plea for civility by asking students “to stay true to our values in the face of provocation, and to respond to bias and intolerance with reason and courage.”TWA 800: The Crash, th...Jack CashillBest Price: $5.99Buy New $18.19(as of 07:45 EDT - Details)

If Rep. Ilhan “Some people did something” Omar had spoken on campus, Agrawal’s letter might have made some sense, but she didn’t. The speaker, Michael Knowles, is cut from the same cloth as his better-known colleague Ben Shapiro: young, sane, restrained, and very smart. The talk that tested campus values was titled, “Men Are Not Women.”

Knowles acknowledged liberal feminist Meghan Murphy as the inspiration for his title. Murphy, the editor of the Feminist Current, was notoriously banned from Twitter for tweeting, “Women aren’t men.” Wrote Murphy after being banned, “This is hardly an abhorrent thing to say, nor should it be considered ‘hateful’ to ask questions about the notion that people can change sex or ask for explanations about transgender ideology.”

Like Chancellor Agrawal, the editors of the Kansas City Star avoided the issue in question and attacked Knowles for daring to raise it. Instead of the chancellor’s pious handwringing, however, the Star editors responded with satire, the talent for which they conspicuously lack. Read the stunningly daft headline, “At UMKC, a D-List conservative was sad to be squirted with the makings of a bubble bath.”